Thinking it Out

Forty years ago, when I was a young man in the jobs market, a man – and it generally was a man – joined a company with the intension of retiring from that self-same company. Not only that but he expected to do the same work, give or take a promotion or two, until he retired. He undertook training in the first years of his careers, qualified and then settled down until his turn came for greater things.

I was one of them. I went to sea as a cadet and sailed with ‘mates’ who took a series of exams as their experience built up until they won their Master’s Certificate at the age of 24 or so and waited for dead men’s shoes for their promotions. It took ten to twelve years in junior roles to be become 1st mate, then another ten to twelve years to become master.

Simple arithmetic shows that a newly promoted master had done absolutely no training for nearly twenty years, and as most masters were fairly senior they had done none for thirty years or more.All this was fairly acceptable when the world was static. In the 1960s we were using the same navigational techniques that they had used in the 1860s and besides the changes from sail to steam and the steam to diesel, out jobs in managing cargo and navigating the ships would have been instantly recognisable by our great-great grandfathers.

But in the late sixties all that changed. Radar and gyro-compasses had been around for a generation, but they were peripheral to our work. Two ships, the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm had managed to hit each other on a clear day in the fastnesses of the North Atlantic and no one could pretend any more that this professional dormancy could continue further. We all had to accept continuous retraining, and that modern tools had to be used properly and fully.

Now all this long tale has a point. Our generation – the over 50s – started our working life in s static environment but with or without us this environment has changed. Two generations have passed since then and the whole culture of work has changed. Nobody expects to retire from the company or even the industry they first join. No one can say any more that they acquired their skills as a young man or woman and that’s it.

But some of us try!

My last job was in the Ports industry. The clerical staff was still processing cargo on bits of paper and hiring specialist companies to do the electronic ‘track and trace’ work. It was almost at the stage where the paper was irrelevant – the clients had received their reports and dealt with the issues days before the paperwork arrived – but they still kept on with it. In their minds they had learned the clerical skills back in the seventies and they should still be relevant now!

My point is that we over-50s have to face some difficult issues if we find ourselves unemployed:

1. The jobs that we knew may never come back;


2. If they do they may not be in the form we knew and loved.

We have to review our skills set and ask to what extent they are transferable to the modern environment and where the shortfalls are. If we have shortfalls then we must address them, and that might mean sitting is a classroom with people a generation or more younger than us.

Uncomfortable without a doubt, but unavoidable.